Quotes About Crises

In our artificial civilization many young people at twenty-five are still on the threshold of activity. As one looks back then, over eight or nine years, one sees a panorama of seemingly formidable length. So many crises, so many startling surprises, so many vivid joys and harrowing humiliations and disappointments, that one feels startlingly old; one wonders if one will ever feel so old again. —Youth and Life, Randolph S. Bourne (1886–1918) Even now, when I have come

since most countries undertook financial liberalisation in the 1970s and 1980s, there has been a marked increase in the frequency of banking crises (see Figure 1).10 Globally, in the period 1970 to 2007, the International Monetary Fund has recorded 124 systemic bank crises, 208 currency crises and 63 sovereign debt crises.11 For modern capitalism instability has become, not the exception, but a seemingly structural feature.

Perestroika is an urgent necessity arising from the profound processes of development in our socialist society. This society is ripe for change. It has long been yearning for it. Any delay in beginning perestroika could have led to an exacerbated internal situation in the near future, which, to put it bluntly, would have been fraught with serious social, economic, and political crises.

Over the last quarter-century—a period that included the Balkans and Iraq and negotiations with Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian issues and numerous other crises—I saw how multiple new forces and factors constrained even the richest and most technologically advanced powers. They—and by that I mean we—could rarely do any longer what we wanted.

Aren't personal crises, loss, sadness, and periods of emotional darkness just part of human nature? Absolutely!

It is only occasionally shaken up, as when the Occupy Wall Street movement of recent years shone an embarrassing light on the financial sector and the grotesque separation between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. And then the media giants find new crises and the nation's inherited disregard for class reboots, as the subject recedes into the background again. An

For this is the heart of the matter: disasters occur where accidents meet character.

Blaming crashes and recessions on random and unpredictable shocks beyond our control has led experts and policy makers to view subsequent crises through the wrong lens. There are random and unpredictable shocks in life, but that doesn't mean we can't face them honestly and prepare for a world in which we know they happen even if we don't know when.

People are not perfect... very often the relationships that are strongest are those where people have worked through big crises, but they've had to work through them. So the challenge to us is to work through that.

This "mind-mindedness" should be apparent in the way we think about and talk to the one we want to help and on how we think about and talk to each other. It is about curiosity and flexibility. It is about how we deal with crises and how we reflect about them. It is about supervision, exercises, role-play and video. It is about a minimum goal of common understanding, good management and a good working milieu.

I've directed seven movies and know a thing or two about dealing with unexpected crises.